Friday, May 24, 2013

Shopper Files: $25 at ULTA

For the last few days I've been playing around shopping on ULTA's website. It's a long story, and really it's for some posts that blogging friends and I will be publishing in a few weeks, but we all had a small amount of money to spend at ULTA or Sephora and it was really somewhat fascinating to see what we were all putting in our carts. Some of us had the "I will buy as many items as possible for as cheap as possible" mentality, some wanted items they knew were amazing and had used before and some wanted more expensive items that they had been lusting after for a while.

Personally, I am usually the as many items as possible girl (and I started out that way) and then I discovered I could add in some Paypal money and I became the "I must spend more money and get all of the big shadow palettes I've wanted for the last year" girl. So, I spent a lot more money than I had.

Anyways, I thought it would be amusing to have a series of posts in which I show you what I'd put in a cart for some of my favorite on-line beauty stores, and using their current deals. I'm starting with ULTA, which this week has a lot of BOGO 50% off items (Revlon, NYX and Maybelline are included). I initially had a cart full of NYX items (over $100 of shadows, concealers, lippies) and eventually subtracted to get under $25 and there was no NYX left.

What I did end up keeping in my cart were 2 Revlon shadow quads. I've heard these are great, though I haven't tried them myself.

I thought I'd pick up 2 different color stories, Brazen is there mainly because it's the palette that Maskcara used for her makeup for brown eyes look. She roughly does what I've pictured above, though really you should watch her video to get the look. She just won Allure's Beauty Blogger of the Year and I'm soooo happy for her! She definitely deserved to win, I voted for her quite often. :D

Second, I have Luscious, which is an amazing green shadow quad. I have been wanting more green shadows and I fully confess that it is because of an episode of House Hunters that I saw recently. Typically the home owners give me great ideas of what not to do with makeup (I'm still scarred because of the woman on Property Brothers that applied massive quantities of the wrong color of mineral makeup to her face in a mask, and that was it. Super powdery, the wrong shade and nothing else, not even a tinted lip balm. Shudder.) but in this episode, the home owner killed it. Seriously, amazing!

In the episode they mention that Cara is a food blogger, and in the stalkerishness of the interwebs, I found a link to it on the HGTV forums, Pearls, Handcuffs & Happy Hour, which I've now book marked as a new favorite. She has a lot of great recipe ideas that will be perfect for my family! She also is a teacher with a teaching blog, The First Grade Parade, and I love that she does things like post pics of herself in her Cinco de Mayo gear in the classroom. Too bad she's in Texas, I want to be her new best friend!

Also in my cart are Maybelline's The Rocket mascara with I'm loving for amazing volume. I need to finally write up a review, but I also need to repurchase to do that. It's just that amazing. And the waterproof liquid liner is one that I haven't tried, but has been on my vanity to try out for a while. My cousin is one of those bottle service girls at a club in Pittsburgh and she swears that this liner stays perfect all night despite being hot and running around like crazy. Sounds good to me!

I personally DESPISE shopping at ULTA. They have tons of great products but the customer service falls short unfortunately. Ever since they took away the checkout with PayPal option I can never manage to place an order with them again, it would just tell me that the payment method isn't available. I honestly don't trust them enough to pay with a debit/credit card.

While I could shop in store, the last time I've done that I ended up with a magazine subscription I didn't want, and one that kept renewing despite having been canceled. That is a no-no in my book. :/

If anyone could give me advice on how to shop at ULTA without getting screwed (especially on the online order issue), I'd really appreciate it. I'd love to shop with them, but they don't seem to want me to. >:

I wonder if it's a browser issue? My friend Pink Sith was complaining about not being able to check out with PayPal from ULTA the other day, but just last week I placed a big order with them and used PayPal.As for the magazine, I just say no when they ask, did they give it to you anyways? It sounds like your store has some issues.

I did try using both Firefox and Chrome, but I still couldn't checkout. When I called ULTA customer service, they maintain it's a Paypal problem and suggested I just use my card, which I really don't trust them with, especially after the magazine subscription issues!

It does seem like my store has some issues. I did say no but it showed up anyway, and it was renewed for this year despite having been canceled last year. Apparently there's a loophole in the law in my state that enables them to do this. :/

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